Priest theorycrafting for 3.2

v3.2

I’m going to go out on a limb and put this up now, even though 3.2 might not break for a couple of months and things might change. I’m mainly putting it up now because I am moving to a more throughput bias for tier 8.5+ priests and you might like to start applying this to gear you collect in preparation for 3.2.

Previously for 3.1 I did a mass of work theorycrafting a set of stat weights for healing priests. This is the updated version for 3.2. To prevent having to post another six or seven post series explaining all the detail I am just going to post the summary (at this point). The formula are all the same with the exception of Replenishment, which has been simplified. For the detail of how these calculations were made refer to that older post.

So I am using pretty much the same model as previously, however I have changed some of the assumptions. As at tier 8.5 priests have more intellect, spirit and spell power generally I have increased the base levels for these in the model. I have also included some of the standard buffs any raiding priest is likely to have. This includes Inner Fire (+174 SP), Prayer of Spirit (+80 spirit), Gift of the Wild (+37 to all attributes), Dalaran Brilliance (+60 intellect) and Blessing of Kings (+10% all attributes).

Also, in my experience in Ulduar (i.e. T8 and T8.5 content levels) mana regen is relatively less important than for priests starting Naxxramas (T7 and T7.5 content). This is because the levels of mana regen stats such as intellect, spirit and MP5 on the gear at this level is sufficient to give a reasonable mana regen. To this end I have increased the throughput:mana regen (spell power:MP5) ratio from the 0.6 I used previously to 2.0. Above tier 8.5 gearing level spell power is the only stat which scales well and continues to give strong additive benefits.

It is important to note that at tier 7.5 and below you are better to use the stat weights in my older posts. This is because a fresh level 80 healing priest needs stats in order something like this:

MP5 > Intellect > Spirit > SP > Crit > Haste

At tier 9 your stat priority is going to be more like:

SP >> Haste > Crit > Intellect > Spirit > MP5.

Assumptions are generally the same as my previous post with the following exceptions:

Mana regeneration is based on the caster spending 90% of their fight time inside the 5 second rule (up from 80% previously).

Stats, where required, are based on Turkelife’s approximate stats at time of writing. This is about a T8.5 gearing level:

The tripling of the spell power to MP5 ratio from 0.6 to 2.0 results in the value of throughput stats (critical rating and haste rating) increasing roughly in proportion. This also increases the value of spirit to holy priests.

As the fight duration is now 8 minutes instead of 6 minutes (Ulduar fights are generally longer) the contribution of intellect has diminished slightly. This is because total mana pool now has to last longer (i.e. you get less MP5 from the same mana pool). This also diminishes the value of Shadowfiend, assuming it is still only used once per fight.

I will do gear lists at some stage to include new 3.2 gear. Thanks for reading and your constructive comments.

Gobble gobble.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 at 1:39 pm and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Thx for the answer about the meta gems… Once there are numbers backing up your claim, it seems way much clearer… thx again

I’m playing on a french server and my fellow priest collegues thank you for your hard work! I’ve been translating them all your theorycrafting and they say their numbers have positively evolved…

Tough they seem to agree with the numbers, there are still personal preferences which die hard! As a tailor and an enchanter, which upgrade is better for the cloak (3.2 weights)? +23 haste or lightweave embroidery (taking into account the next up in tailoring and the internal cd, if there is one)? Same question for the +18 spirit or +12 crit/+12 hit for the boots?

I’d say the embroidery and the +18 spirit are better, but it’s a guess based on my own calculations (which don’t compare to yours).

[…] RAWR currently does not include 3.2 items or weight changes. I did come across BobTurkey's blog. His conclusion is that with the changes to replenishment (and increased fight lengths) spirit has […]

OK there are a number of issues here. Firstly I was a bit lazy and was still thinking of my 3.1 stat weights. I’ll move my brain to 3.2 numbers.

OK, next, I can’t provide meaningful numbers on the boot enchants. If you go purely on the stats then yes +18 spirit is much better than Tuskarr’s Vitality, even if you are a Disc priest. However my experience is that having the small run speed increase is very useful for moving out of bad stuff and staying near moving raiders and the like. I prefer the movement increase.

OK the cloak. Firstly I didn’t realised they’d changed Lightweave again so it now adds SP instead of inflicting holy damage. My bad.

hanzi
almost everyone recommends Tuskarr’s for boots, on most class forums. Part of the problem is none of the boot enchants are so very awesome so it’s a good one to make a tradeoff on.

The second reason is with all the movement required in fights, the extra run speed and little bit of stam can make the difference between a hit that kills you and one that doens’t, or a tick of damage and 2 ticks of damage. It gives a little extra edge to the player who is the bomb so they are a little less likely to get everyone killed.

It’s a defensive enchantment. It’s not a throughput increasing one.

Sure you can yell “L2P!” at everyone in your raid but that doesn’t really work very well.

In deed, Tuskarr’s can be a life saver; several fellow priests have confirmed this; though I’ve never felt the need to use it, I agree it may come in handy.

Concerning Darkglow, wowhead says it can restore 400 mana points (up from 300).http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=55769
I guess Bob has still some work to do 🙂
What about a post where you sum it all up?

Towards the end of Ulduar I was aiming for Intel as my primary stat. Now the “numbers” suggest more spellpower and haste. What did push the numbers from a combo intel/crit to a new one of spellpower/haste?

Yeah I need it 🙂 I guess I am slow or something. But I never died to Heigan since I got it, and it helps me outrun eyebeams on kologarn, I think.
My ping increased to 200 since I switched from comcast to DSL, but I hate giving comcast any more money heh 🙂

re: “Towards the end of Ulduar I was aiming for Intel as my primary stat. Now the “numbers” suggest more spellpower and haste. What did push the numbers from a combo intel/crit to a new one of spellpower/haste?”

Its more of a move from mana regen to throughput.

The reasons for this was that in my personal experience I was getting significantly dimishing returns from more regen. My inside-5-second-rule regen is about 340-360 unbuffed. I very rarely have mana issues of any sort except when battle rezed. So if mana regen is unnecessary then I might as well focus on throughput.

To tell you the truth the changing emphasis doesn’t make significant difference to your ability to heal and it doesn’t significantly effect the gear listings.

I was really focused on those numbers, gemming and choosing my gear according to the lootrank list. It was a mistake, maybe…

Now I’m trying to balance those numbers: int/spirit and haste/crit, but the main stat I’m after is clearly spellpower. Even if the first encouter in the Colliseum is kind of weak, there are huge spike of damage and I’m glad I chose to invest in spellpower. To early to say if the next fights are going to be mana heavy.

[…] hanzi23 brought to my attention how outdated some of my opinions are on enchants. So in an effort to rectify that I discovered a personal need to publish my suggested enchants for 3.2. So without further addo: […]

Thats got the weightings for shadow priests. Were you trying to compare them directly against my holy ones? That won’t work without a little bit of math. That is to normalise the values, probably to spell power = 2.0.

Did I miss something? It seems to me that you counted twice the value given from spirit (because unbuffed, you already have your amount counted) : if i add 850/4, I end up with 2640, which is the value you have.

Of course it doesn’t modify the rest of your guide, but but I thought i understood the mechanics until i found that value 🙂

btw: Excellent guide, useful, and even if i won’t be using your last advice since i lack of mana a lot (Am i the only one? -_-) i prefere tokeep my 25k unbuffed manapool in holy instead of gemming SP (which would probably induce overhealing…)

re: gearing for regen vs gearing for SP – personally i’ve started gearing for SP and i’m geared about T8.5. I’ve gained about 200 base SP. I’ve gone from very rarely using shadow fiend/hymn of hope to using them sometimes.

I am Disc almost exclusively ATM and I do notice that my fellow Holy priests seem to have more mana issues. This may partially be due to the difference between Rapture, which generates about 215 MP5, and Holy Concentration, which only generates about 80 MP5. But this as the cause for the Disc vs Holy mana regen difference is only a guess.

Quality theorycrafting posts get a red flag in my RSS reader. Those are the posts I’m taking a small break for to read and comment. It seems this one ended on my ‘todo’ list, to make sure I’d make enough time to read it in depth. Alas! I went on a vacation and has been lingering in my todo list ever since. Sorry for my late response Bob! I do not consider your theorycraft any less important because of my late reply 😉

First of all, this is very interesting work. Great job. I hope you’ll forgive me I’ll make some notes.

Your change in ratio throughput:regen is enourmous. Going from 0.7 to 1.4 would signify an 80% shift. Going from 0.6 to 2.0 is a serious shift in weight (more than 160% by the looks of it). I’m not going to object this at all but I do wonder on what you based the quantity of this shift on. Was it instinct, or guts telling you to go that far?
Anyways, while I fully understand the reason behind it, my first reaction was “wait a sec… won’t your list then promote throughput items with haste, crit, sp and intellect instead of spirit?”. Odly enough, the answer is no. The reason is your incredibly high value of spell power. This effectively makes you favor spirit items through spiritual guidance.

In fact, looking at your weights, you value spirit more for its throughput than its regen power. This struck me as peculiar and I investigated your lootlist with care. I was amused to see the lootrank top list isn’t dramatically different from my list of preferred items 🙂

Still, something strikes me as odd. According to my calculations, intellect should give about 92% of the regen power of MP5 for your holy priest. Taking into account the throughput and maximum mana, it should outscore MP5. It doesn’t make a whole lot of difference, since rarely a player must chose between intellect and mp5 but I do classify intellect as better. Even more so if you want to promote throughput. Sadly I cannot completely pinpoint the exact difference since we split up our calculations differently but it seems I estimate the regen higher.

That’s regen alone, so it scores a tad less than mp5 but the crit value you give it should make it outscore mp5 then. I’m going to trace this back to your calculations in your first post. I must have missed something 😉

PS: Does the druid buff stack with AI and DS now? I thought it didn’t 😦

I personnally thought that the 2200 Base spell power was already modified by your base spirit. that’s why when I calculated, I only added the spell power given by buffs!

That’s why I found the 2200 BS unbuff value extremely low as a holy priest 🙂

Thanks a lot for your quick answer.

nb: zusterke got me a really stupid question : None of you calculate the mp5 value of shadowfiend while casting hymn of hope?

I might try to use it as soon as I reach 65% of my manapool, but i usually wait for a calm moment and cast both, assuming that it will give me more mana (around 45% i’d say). I have no clue for now of the efficiency of that 😀

I must admit I try and use hymn+shadowfiend for a full mana bar. Some fights the shadowfiend is killed or I am forced to stop channelling the hymn, but it usually works. If you added this combo to the stat weights it would increase the benefit of intellect somewhat.

@zusterke – All responses are welcome if they are constructive 😉 Thanks for the great feedback!

Yeah the swing from 0.6 to 2.0 SP:MP5 ratio is huge. Initially I was using a 1.5 ratio. This just didn’t seem throughput focused enough so I ended up at 2.0. Part of it is gut feeeling and part of it is indifference!

Indifference? Yes indifference. The difference in gear lists between a 1.5 and 2.0 or even a 2.5 ratio isn’t that astronomical. There are some differences, but generally you are jsut rearranging the ordering of the limited pool of available drops. (Most uses of difference in a single a paragraph ever!)

For Holy priests who are throughput focused spirit really starts to shine. Not only do you get the regen component (reduced as it is from ye good olde days) but you also get a big boos via Spiritual Guidance. Holy priests and spirit get a further boost, compared to Discipline, as their special mana return talent (Holy Concentration) is based on regen not mana pool (Rapture).

Holy and Spirit gets more from mana regen than throughput? No this is not the case.

Re: Intellect vs MP5. Ooops, missed to take that into account in your stat weights. You’re right! All is fine then 🙂

I understand your point about the weight shift. The limited drop pool allows greater shifts indeed! There’s quite some room to work with.

@bridermoon: you’re absolutely right but I wouldn’t stop there. Imagine the fight takes 400s and you cast a fiend after 1 minute and 5 minutes later. The amount of regen it then gives is much higher. Then imagine the first being cast simulateously with Bloodlust (for increased effect) and the last one with hymn of hope. Then the shaman pops his mana tide totem while HoH is up. Your mana return from int would blow out of proportion.

This is a very effective method of regaining mana, whether you stack intellect or not. However, I do not base myself on that for my regen. Why? Because it would shift my regen model in favor of intellect to a point where I would stack almost only intellect. It’s a valid choice but you create a dependency on those tricks to make your regen work. Picture the fight going bad and you have to pop the fiend before bloodlust, or without HoH, or the replenishment source dying.. you will end up with less regen as planned. A less streamlined fight just might cost you your regen and thus a healer for the fight. It’s because of this dependency that I wouldn’t rely on it in my regen model. That doesn’t mean I won’t try to get HoH+fiend+Totem combo’s but it means I’ll last without them.

[…] I used two gearing theories. Firstly is the more throughput focused one I posted about in my previous post on theorycrafting. The second idea is a more mana regen focused stat weight set. The mana regen stat weights use the […]

This is the first site I’ve found that confirms my gear choices as disc. I run with similar throughput stat weightings, although I favor more int for shield spams and max regen from fiend, hymn, rapture, replenishment etc.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the only drawback from having zero spirit/mp5 would be more downtime between pulls because I have to drink. It’s too bad the ilvl 245/258 gear has less crit/haste alternatives to spirit/mp5.

As it turns out BobTurkey, you are absolutely correct, it doesn’t affect the gear choices very much at all (the only thing that shifted was another option for cloaks came up when I used your haste values instead of mine).

Your post also lead me to digging Greater Heal out and trying it some more, since it would not hit the GCD haste cap (well, It could but that’d be a LOT of haste). Turns out that, with my haste values, When I get borrowed time and Flash Heal dips below 1sec cast, Greater Heal is down below 1.5 seconds cast time…

That ends up taking GHeal from 33% more Heal/sec to 50% more Heal/sec, which could do devilishly wonderful things for my ability to heal tanks in trouble.

Bob – you’ve increased Holy Concentration’s contribution to Spirit from 0.0664 in 3.1 to 0.0827 in 3.2. You’ve explicitly stated that you increased your base Int and Spi values from 3.1 to a more T8.5-ish level, but did you also increase your assumption about the raid-buffed crit chance of 25%? If not, at T8.5 gearing, shouldn’t this assumption be higher, thus leading to more HC uptime and even more weight for Spirit as a Holy Priest?

Yes it should. My raid buffed crit is always at least 30% and usually closer to 40%. However until I can find some good numbers on Holy Concentration uptime with higher crit I have nothing to change this too.

Let me know if you are aware of any such data. I’m raiding purely as discipline ATM so I can’t easily access this information.

I’m a disc priest in Taiwan(the country in East Asia) WOW, your article is very useful to me. May I translate your article(included Priest theorycrafting, Gear list, Trinket and Gems..) to Chinese and post it to one of the Taiwan biggest WOW Forum(a BBS system which called PTT)? I think lots of Taiwanese player will get help from your priest article.

[…] an itemization for druids anywhere. Well, I can, but it’s not nearly as useful as any of the priest ones. With the priests I get a gear score I can tweak and make work. With druids it’s Spellpower […]

Hey Bob, Long time reader of your blog and faithfully checking your numbers. I would like to see where we are headed as far as stat weighting for 3.3 if the same spellpower to regen ratio is going to hold up or are we going to see some of the fights requiring higher regen (the green dragon fight). I have been actively PTR testing and would love to get some dialogue going with you.

At this point in time I’m expecting the spellpower to MP5 ratio to remain 2:1. I’ve not seen any of the new fights on the PTR but i’m not expecting them to cause significant change to this ratio.

There may be a fight or two where it is worth swapping out throughput trinkets for regen focused ones, and/or eating MP5 food and/or perhaps balancing groups carefully to take full advantage of Mana Tide, etc, but I doubt there is going to be a new precedent in terms of mana consumption in 3.3.

[…] I used two gearing theories. Firstly is the more throughput focused one I posted about in my previous posts on theorycrafting. The second idea is a more mana regen focused stat weight set. The mana regen stat weights use the […]